Recent articles by Catherine Belsey, Richard Halpern, and James Schiffer
have shifted the critical focus of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
from questions of what the poem means, to how it means, from its moral
allegory to its erotic and literary effects. For Belsey, this transition
arose from her sense that readers of Shakespeare's epyllion who seek a
"moral center that would furnish the work with a final meaning, a conclusion,
a definitive statement" (262) tend to be interpreted by the poem in the
very effort made to interpret it. Venus and Adonis, Belsey contends,
"prompts in the reader a desire for action it fails to gratify. Meanwhile,
the critical tradition in its turn, tantalized by the poem's lack of closure,
has sought to make something happen, at least at the thematic level" (262).
[1] Likewise, Halpern asserts that "Venus
and Adonis is not only a poem about female sexual frustration; it
is meant to produce such frustration. Just as Adonis' beauty arouses Venus
but refuses to satisfy her, so Shakespeare's poem aims to arouse and frustrate
the female reader" (381). Similarly, Schiffer argues that the poem dramatizes
a Lacanian conception of desire to the extent that it reveals "desire
can never be truly satisfied, because desire is always for absence, for
lack, for what is not there" (369).

Although I agree that the poem aims to inspire a sense of frustration
in its reader through its unrealized promise of satisfying closure, I
do not think adequate attention has been paid to the rhetorical and intertextual
elements that work to effect a reader's frustration. This paper aims,
then, to demonstrate that the poem's frustrating effects are largely a
product of its rhetorical design, the fact that a substantial portion
of the narrative's comic-tragic trajectory is constructed through patterns
of opposition, resolution, and subsequent disunion. Moreover, a closer
rhetorical and intertextual analysis of Venus and Adonis reveals
that the poem's "erotic ontology" (Halpern 383) does not, as Halpern suggests,
restrict its frustrating effects to early modern female readers. Instead,
the poem's reversal of gender norms enables a complex and unstable series
of identifications that betray any straightforward assertion that a male
reader is less likely to sympathize with Venus's cause than is a female
reader; or, on the other hand, that a female reader is necessarily prone
to identify with Venus over and against Adonis. Indeed, one of the primary
effects of the poem's gender reversal is to complicate the process of
identification so essential to literary response, making the identificatory
process itself an issue for the reader, rather than something operating
in terms of gender alone.

Part of the complexity involved in how a reader responds to the poem's
use of reversals results from the way that Shakespeare organizes the symbolic
oppositions through which the text is constructed. S. Clark Hulse understands
the iconographic and imagistic oppositions in the poem less in terms of
sustained narrative deferral, than as an expression of the poem's mythic
and existentially mediating design:

Shakespeare's sophisticated reworking of a literary myth [in Venus
and Adonis] comes suprisingly close to recovering the function
that Levi-Strauss suggests for primary myth: 'to bridge the gap between
conflicting values through a series of mediating devices, each of
which generates the next one by a process of opposition and correlation.'
(Hulse 172-3, Levi-Strauss 213-23)

For Hulse, "Shakespeare's manner of paradox making has the characteristics
of a persistent personal syntax. Indeed, if we think of myth as a conceptual
form rather than as a content, we might call it Shakespeare's personal
myth, a way of perceiving and reconciling the paradoxes of experience"
(173). Although the poem's imagistic and rhetorical design, its "mediating
devices" as it were, clearly orbit the mythic concerns of existential
and ideological antagonisms, Shakespeare's text makes no claim, as does
primary myth, to "explanatory totality" (Levi-Strauss 213-23). Venus
and Adonis, in other words, has no pretensions of reconciling "the
paradoxes of experience"; it dramatizes such paradoxes and, as Belsey
argues, it problematizes certain conflicting values -- but it offers no
answers. To this extent, Shakespeare's poem makes explicit what Jacques
Derrida sees as the latent unending deferral operating in all mythic structures
of thought. For Derrida the

themes [in myth] duplicate themselves to infinity. When we think
we have disentangled them from each other and can hold them separate,
it is only to realize that they are joining together again, in response
to the attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unity
of myth is only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state
or moment of the myth (526).

Unlike primary myth, which aims explicitly towards a complete mediation
of existential and ideological oppositions, Venus and Adonis purposefully
resists the state of closure, the point of full reconciliation of opposites.
In this sense, Shakespeare's poem makes dramatically explicit what Derrida
locates as an implicit feature of mythic thought in general.

By choosing the sixain form of Thomas Lodge's epyllion Scillaes Metamorphosis
over the heroic couplets of Marlowe's minor epic Hero and Leander,
[2] Shakespeare is able to create a sense of
narrative deferral through the use of repetition offered by the smaller
narrative units of the sixain pattern. Indeed, when we compare the opening
stanza of Venus and Adonis with the opening of Marlowe's poem,
for instance, we notice that Shakespeare emphasizes action and movement
rather than description and imagistic detail. The sense of movement achieved
in the opening of Shakespeare's poem occurs through a series of implied
similes that are contiguously linked. Marlowe, on the other hand, begins
by describing the Ovidian world of Hero and Leander. In particular
he draws on the Ovidian ekphrastic tradition in his description of Hero's
garments. Such extended detail so early in the poem focuses less on dramatic
action than on the narrator's witty rhetorical displays and his capacity
for evoking lush visual imagery:

At
Sestos, Hero dwelt; Hero the faire . . .
The
outside of her garments were of lawne
The
lining, purple silke, with guilt starres drawne,
Her
wide sleeves greene, and bordered with a grove
Where
Venus in her naked glory strove. (7-11)

In Shakespeare's poem, however, we get neither extended physical description
nor anything approaching narrative aside until the ekphrasis at line 259
when Adonis fails to mount his "trampling courser." Instead, we are immediately
presented with Venus' wooing of Adonis through a series of contiguous
images that creates tension and movement:

Even
as the sun with purple-colored face
Had
ta'en last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked
Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting
he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
Sick-thoughted
Venus makes amain unto him,
And
like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him. (1-6)

These opening six lines present the reader with three movements of pursuit
and one clear instance of abandonment. The larger narrative movement of
pursuit and abandonment in the poem is thus encapsulated in this opening
stanza as the first six lines initiate a movement towards resolution but
conclude by simply emphasizing further pursuit. The proleptic image of
the sun leaving the "weeping morn" frames both Adonis's and Venus' respective
pursuits, establishing the poem's pattern of endless seeking, a pattern
which fails to cease even at Adonis' death. In this case the pattern evolves
through a series of contiguously associated implied similes that develop
from the sun and morn to Adonis and the chase, to Venus and her erotic
hunt. Shakespeare spends little time describing the mythic world that
his characters inhabit; instead, he employs the image of the sun to establish
the theme of temporality and the cycle of loss and dissatisfaction to
which Venus and Adonis are prisoners. The chiasmus in line four introduces
a rhetorical reversal that mirrors the gender reversal of the sexual combatants;
such reversals, and the oxymoronic rhetoric they are often figured through,
are central to establishing the sense of opposition characteristic of
the poem and the subsequent sense of postponement such opposition inspires.

From the very beginning of the poem the key axis upon which the narrative
moves is not the totalizing motion of metaphor, but a series of delayed
and incomplete contiguous or metonymic relationships. The beginning of
Venus and Adonis, which already alludes to its own unsatisfying
end, begins a pattern or cycle of unfulfillment that repeats throughout
the text. This repetition of unfulfillment constitutes the narrative's
postponement or detour which sustains the sense of tension that is usually
accented by the "middle section" of the narrative and then resolved at
the end. [3] In Venus and Adonis, however,
the beginning, middle, and end all play a role in enhancing the sense
of postponement and delay. By dividing the first 810 lines of the poem
into four narrative movements each constituting (with the exception of
the ekphrasis) a pattern of pursuit, ostensible resolution and subsequent
opposition, it becomes clear that the poem is experienced as an
over-determined series of unresolved patterns of sexual pursuit intertwined
with moments of apparent, but finally unrealized union. Lines 1-258 constitute
the first main narrative pattern which is followed by the "breeding jennet"
episode (259-324). Subsequently, lines 325-545 renew Venus' momentum lost
at the end of the first section. This third movement concludes with the
kiss at 545, but rather than satiating Venus the kiss leads to yet another
intensification of her desire: "Now quick desire hath caught the yielding
prey/ And glutton like she feeds, yet never filleth" (547-8). This intensification
of desire and the unbearable sense of frustration it inspires reaches
its climax at the poem's centre when it becomes apparent to the reader,
if not to Venus, that "All is imaginary. . . / He will not manage her,
although he mount her" (597-8). Venus follows this with an impassioned,
if "over-handled," speech that Adonis be ruled by her rather than Cynthia
[4] and Cynthia's subordinate, the boar. This
takes us up to the tragic movement of the poem which furthers Venus' sense
of loss and dissatisfaction through Adonis' death and the eventual "cropping"
of the anemone. These larger narrative units within the first section
of the poem contain a series of smaller narratives, as well as imagistic
and metynomic patterns that develop the pattern of cyclic unfulfillment.
Such sequences of images and the intertexts they evoke work in combination
to develop the ceaseless detour and postponement of sexual and narrative
resolution.

Lines 1-254 constitute the first extended narrative pattern of pursuit,
imaginary resolution, and subsequent opposition. This narrative segment
begins with the opening stanza that initiates Venus' hunt of Adonis and
it moves towards the imaginary resolution of her attempt to "hemm [Adonis]
here/ Within the circuit of this ivory pale" (228-9). Venus' desire to
imaginatively alter Adonis' perception of the world in her favour is then
foiled when the narrator intervenes: "her words are done, her woes the
more increasing/ The time is spent, her object will away/ And from her
twining arms doth urge releasing" (254-6). Adonis then breaks from her
arms and chases after his "trampling courser," allowing the major narrative
cycle to repeat while the sub-plot of the horses portrays the quenching
of previously thwarted desire. The primary sequence of pursuit and failure
is over-determined within this first narrative unit through a series of
imagistic and intertextual patterns that repeat the narrative cycle of
unfulfillment. Between lines 55-90, for instance, the narration moves
from the predatory eagle imagery of stanza 10 to Adonis' coy escape when
"her lips were ready for his pay/ He winks, and turns his lips another
way" (89-90). This movement away from Venus breaks the ostensible union
established through the imaginary "truce" where "one sweet kiss shall
pay this comptless debt" (84). This early and failed attempt at seduction
initiates a common rhetorical play on paradoxical images that insinuate
incommensurability while ostensibly expressing a sense of sensual reciprocity.

Although the narrator indicates the possibility of union through the
anxiously awaited kiss, his use of market language reveals that such desire
is "comptless," hence unpayable. This rhetoric of monetary exchange accentuates
the incommensurability between a Goddess and a human; its irony and humour
arise through an unlikely figure in which Adonis is presented as infinitely
wealthy and Venus as an impoverished investor in the market of love. Although
the narration seems to sympathize with Venus to the extent that "she cannot
choose but love" while Adonis remains uninterested, the patterning of
imagery consistently implies a constitutional sense of dissension set
between them. Line 81, for instance, introduces another proleptic image
that looks forward to Venus' lament for Adonis when he is prosopopeically
figured by the anemone: "And by her fair immortal hand she swears/ From
his soft bosom never to remove" (81-2). This image is reversed at the
poem's tragic end when she holds the flower in the "hollow cradle" of
her breast. Venus' desire never to be removed from Adonis' breast, and
the previous image of Adonis "fastened" in her net, evoke the false, or
in Northrop Frye's terms, demonic union [5]
of Ovid's "Salamacis and Hermaphrodite." Salamacis, like Venus, grapples
her lover/foe as she

[catches]
him fast betweene hir armes for ought that he could do
Yea
maugre all his wrestling and his struggling to and fro
She
held him still, and kissed him a hundred times and mo
And
willde he nillde he with hir handes she toucht his naked breast
And
now on this side now on that (for all he did resist
And
strive to wrest him from hir gripes) she clung unto him fast
And
wound about him like a Snake, which snatched up in hast
And
being by the Prince of Birdes borne lightly up aloft
Doth
writhe hir selfe about his necke and griping talants oft,
And
cast hir taile about his wings displayed in the winde.
(Golding
trans. 442-52)

The dramatization of this violent union leads up to the poem's tragic
finale in which "Salamacis and Hermaphrodite" merge "in one form and face,"
completing Hermaphrodite's emasculation. The intertextual relationship
between Salamacis and Venus is ambiguous at this point because on the
one hand Venus is the Goddess of love and thus she offers Adonis the possibility
of manhood rather than posing any threat to his masculinity, yet on the
other a clear parallel is drawn between her and Salamacis through the
similarity of their predatory images. What is unambiguous about the Ovidian
intertext at this point is that it indicates a sense of unresolved or
at least unsatisfying union. Indeed, Venus and Adonis' relationship is
aligned very early on with the negative Ovidian transformations of dissension
and false union rather than narratives which dramatize full reciprocity.

If we trace the imagistic patterning of lines 55-90 we notice that they
follow our sequence of opposition, imaginary union, and subsequent conflict.
In stanza 10 Venus is figured as an "empty eagle" gluttonously feeding
on her prey. The final couplet of the stanza plays on the Sisyphian or
Tantalean nature of her desire: "Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek,
his chin/ And where she ends she doth anew begin" (60). The end couplet
of the next stanza momentarily resolves this oppositional image of predatorial
feeding by representing Venus' imaginary and hypothetical hope for satisfaction.
Just as Venus will ostensibly resolve this first major narrative pattern
through images of potential reciprocity in which she imagines her body
as a park that contains Adonis who is transformed into a deer, she resolves
this minor sequence by "Wishing her cheeks were gardens full of flowers/
So they were dewed with [his breath's] distilling showers" (65-6). Here
again the imaginary and hypothetical nature of Venus' imagery of reciprocation
masks the predatory action which the narration had just presented. In
the following stanza the narrator reverses Venus' wish full-filling flower
and rain imagery into its dialectical opposite, turning the garden full
of flowers into a "river that is rank/ Perforce will force it overflow
the bank" (72-3). Thus we move from an image of opposition that the narrator
presents in stanza 10, to an image of reciprocation that comes from Venus
in the following stanza, back to an image of opposition that reverses
Venus' hope for union. The same pattern then repeats over the next two
stanzas as lines 73-8 introduce the oppositional colour motif of red and
white which is momentarily resolved in the couplet of the following stanza
where "one sweet kiss shall pay this comptless debt" (84). The sense of
sexual combat and the tension which provokes it is bodied forth through
the narrator's heavy use of medial caesura and the repetition of terms
such as "still" and "entreats" which overtly express a sense of frustration:

Still
she entreats, and prettily entreats
For
to a pretty ear she tunes her tale
Still
is he sullen, still he low'rs and frets
'Twixt
crimson shame and anger ashy-pale.
Being
red, she loves him best; and being white
Her
best is bettered with a more delight. (73-8)

The colour imagery which expresses Adonis' combination of fear and anger
recalls us again to a similar passage in Golding's translation of "Salamacis
and Hermaphroditus":

This
sed, the Nymph did hold hir peace, and therewithall the boy
Waxt
red : he wist not what love was : and sure it was a joy
For
in his face the color fresh appeared like the same
That
is in Apples which doe hang upon the Sunnie side :
Or
Ivorie shadowed with a red : or such as is espide
Of
white and scarlet colours mixt appearing in the Moone.
(Golding
400-6)

One of the most distinguishing features of Shakespeare's variation on
this Ovidian passage results from the metrical patterning of the sixain
stanza which naturally lends itself to a closing couplet that develops
or reverses the sense of the previous lines. The closing couplet of stanza
13, for instance, plays on the sense of desire's incapacity for fulfillment
that closed out the previous stanza with the river imagery. This sense
of Venus' insatiability is then repeated in the following stanza through
the trope of the comptless debt. Such imagistic patterning and rhetorical
reversals, which are usually accomplished in the final couplet of the
sixain, are more fully exploited in Shakespeare than in Ovid. Moreover,
within this minor narrative and imagistic unit of lines 55-90 we see that
the closing couplets of stanzas 10, 12, 13, and 15 express the constitutional
impossibility of Venus satisfying her desire for Adonis, while stanzas
11 and 14 present an imaginary sexual resolution. Shakespeare thus adopts
much of Ovid's imagery in order to dramatize the sexual combat between
Venus and Adonis at the same time as he exploits a series of rhetorical
reversals in order to create the sense of an irreconcilable gap between
the characters' perception of one another.

Because Venus' sensuality is highly verbal as well as deeply physical,
she has far greater success achieving a union of words than of bodies.
Her failure to entice Adonis reaches a brief and comic climax in lines
85-9 which completes this minor narrative pattern while developing the
water and flood imagery that re-appears when Adonis sets off to meet the
boar mid-way through the poem. Line 86 embellishes the flood imagery introduced
in the couplet of stanza 11 as Adonis "like a divedapper peering through
a wave. . ./ ducks as quickly in:/ So offers he to give what she did crave,
But when her lips were ready for his pay/ He winks, and turns his lips
another way" (86-9). This comic disappearing act is tragically replayed
at line 819 as Adonis vanishes in the waves of a "merciless and pitchy
night." The flood imagery takes on more profoundly tragic dimensions as
the shift in tone from the comic to the mournful is initiated with the
image of Adonis being swallowed into the darkness of approaching death:

.
. . after him she darts, as one on shore
Gazing
upon a late-embarked friend
Till
the wild waves will have him seen no more
Whose
ridges with the meeting clouds contend.
So
did the merciless and pitchy night
Fold
in the object that did feed her sight.
Whereat
amazed, as one that unaware
Hath
dropped a precious jewel in the flood. . . (816-34)

The imagery of the rising and devouring waves contending with the limits
of sky expresses a sense of tragic foreboding that extends beyond Adonis'
particularity. This sense of the world becoming increasingly tragic in
tone is realized more fully when Venus bewails the loss of true beauty
that dies with Adonis. "Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost/
What face remains alive that's worth the viewing?/. . . The flowers are
sweet, their colors fresh and trim,/ But true sweet beauty lived and died
with him" (1075-80). The patterning of flood imagery embellishes and repeats
the cycle of loss and unfulfillment throughout the smaller narrative sequences
as well as the larger shift from the comic to the tragic. This pattern
overdetermines the profound sense of frustration that Venus eloquently,
if unsuccessfully, strives to resolve.

The erotic rhetoric intensifies towards the end of the first major narrative
pattern (lines 1-258) as Adonis arouses greater and greater frustration
in his pursuer. The carnal and even violent crescendo of the narrative
at this point is marked by a cyclic movement of metonymic images which
propels the sense of narrative and sexual postponement. The sequence of
images from lines 240-53 moves through a metonymic logic that concludes
as it began, taking us through an imagistic variation of the cyclic pattern
of incommensurability, union, and subsequent opposition. These lines immediately
follow Venus' wish-fulfilling and imaginary transformation into a park;
they begin by reversing the sense of union proposed by the park imagery
and then re-introduce it, only to undo it yet again:

At
this Adonis smiles as in disdain
That
in each cheek appears a pretty dimple;
Love
made those hollows, if himself were slain
He
might be buried in a tomb so simple
Foreknowing
well, if there he came to lie
Why,
there love lived, and there he could not die.
These
lovely caves, these round enchanting pits,
Opened
their mouths to swallow Venus' liking
Being
mad before, how doth she now for wits?
Struck
dead at first, what needs a second striking?
Poor
queen of love, in thine own law forlorn,
To
love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn! (241-53)

The patterning of images in these two stanzas illustrates the sort of
narrative negotiation between Venus' desire and the reality principle
of Adonis' refutations that constitutes much of the poem's structural
motion. The metonymic sequence begins with Adonis' dimple metamorphosing
into a "tomb so simple" where Cupid may lie "if himself were slain." Here
again, the poem's paradoxical rhetoric balances a latent sense of impending
tragedy while manifestly expressing the young boy's remarkable beauty.
As the narrative focus shifts from Cupid to Venus, Adonis' tomb like dimples
transform again into "lovely caves round enchanting pits. . . [which]
opened their mouths to swallow Venus' liking" (247-8). This transformation
introduces one of the most explicit and sensual images of Venus' masculine
position in the poem. The highly charged euphemism of Venus penetrating
Adonis' "dimple" gives way as the narrative shifts from Venus' perception
of the situation to the actual distance placed between her and Adonis:
"Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn/ To love a cheek that smiles
at thee in scorn." Here the narrative moves away from Venus' perception
of Adonis' dimple as a sexualized and penetrable object to a more sober
and less erotic view of the situation. The patterning of imagery, here,
is cyclic in motion, moving from dimple to tomb, to cave, to pit, to mouth,
to cheek again. Such patterning creates a sense of movement towards quiescence
while continually frustrating its realization. Moreover, Venus' imaginary
and metaphoric transformations are continually undermined by the narration's
re-deployment of her own rhetoric, revealing that there is not "relief
enough" within her limits.

The reversal of gender roles in Venus and Adonis, as in Ovid's
"Salamacis and Hermaphrodite", plays an integral role in the necessarily
frustrating conclusion the relation is driven towards. Venus' masculine
role bodied forth in lines 55-90 is complemented in the third narrative
section (lines 325-545) as Adonis unwittingly tropes himself in effeminate
and emasculating terms. In an attempt to counter Venus' carpe diem
argument, Adonis displays wisdom beyond his years, at the same time as
he expresses an unwitting effeminacy and immature narcissism that undermines
his argument:

'Who
wears a garment shapeless and unfinished
Who
plucks the bud before one leaf put forth?
If
springing things be any jot diminished
They
wither in their prime, prove nothing worth.
The
colt that's backed and burdened being young
Loseth
his pride, and never waxeth strong.
You
hurt my hand with wringing; let us part
And
leave this idle theme, this bootless chat;
Remove
your siege from my unyielding heart;
To
love's alarms it will not ope the gate.
Dismiss
your vows, your feigned tears, your flatt'ry;
For
where a heart is hard they make no batt'ry.' (415- 26)

In line 417 Adonis implicitly reintroduces the absent and/or flaccid phallus
theme with unintentionally humorous results. Then in line 423, through
another unfortunate choice of images, he portrays himself as the assailed
virgin striving to keep the female phallus from his unyielding gate. Finally
he adds insult to his own injury when he reveals that the only "hard"
thing about him is his unbattered heart. Adonis' self-emasculating choice
of images weakens his position in the poem, indicating an unnatural fear
of intimacy that leads some readers to sympathize with Venus' reproach
of the coy and unyielding boy.

It is the insistent absence of a satisfying male presence in Venus
and Adonis, according to Halpern and Schiffer, which accounts for
much of the poem's frustrating effect. Halpern reads this absence in the
context of the poem's misogynistic and male centered vision of Venus'
sexuality. Challenging the assumption that Shakespeare's audience was
predominantly male, Halpern cites a variety of sources from the period
to show that Venus and Adonis was often characterized as the reading
material of "courtesans, lascivious nuns, adulterous housewives, or libidinous
young girls" rather than the "sophisticated" readers alluded to in the
Ovidian epigraph (377). Halpern's case regarding the poem's misogyny and
its intention to frustrate primarily female readers is overstated to the
extent that it underestimates the poem's capacity to titillate readers
representing any number of gender and sexual differences, as is indicated
by Titan's position in the poem:

By
this the lovesick queen began to sweat
For
where they lay the shadow had forsook them
And
Titan, tired in the midday heat
With
burning eye did hotly overlook them
Wishing
Adonis had his team to guide
So
he were like him, and by Venus' side. (175-80)

Titan's evocation here accentuates the poem's lack of a satisfying male
presence, and his wish parallels that of a male reader frustrated with
Adonis's coyness. Titan manifests a heterosexual male reader's desire
within the poem, marking out a definite textual site that invites a reader
to play out his desire through identification with a powerful, yet finally
absent, male presence in the narrative. Such passages indicate that Shakespeare's
text does not discriminate in its capacity to titillate and amuse as well
as frustrate its readers; if it did, its popularity in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries would be even more difficult to explain than
is already the case.

As we saw in the poem's first narrative sequence (1-259), the poem's
Tantalean structure moves through a series of images that express an apparent
but unrealized union. This initial sequence establishes the imagistic
and structural basis upon which the rest of the poem is then based. Within
the larger narrative patterns of the poem there are smaller imagistic
sequences, intertextual elements, and rhetorical forms that develop the
dissension between Venus and Adonis while manipulating the reader's desire
for a resolution to this dissension. These patterns also constitute the
structural form of the third narrative pattern (lines 325-545) which begins
by making explicit the Ovidian theme that unexpressed desire leads to
dire consequences. Developing on the river and flood imagery introduced
in lines 70-90, the narration moves from the ekphrasis (259-324) which
expresses the fulfillment of desire to the mounting tension of Venus'
lust and Adonis' growing impatience:

An
oven that is stopped, or river stayed,
Burneth
more hotly, swelleth with more rage;
So
of concealed sorrow may be said
Free
vent of words love's fire doth assuage;
But
when the heart's attorney once is mute
The
client breaks, as desperate in his suit. (331-6)

The narrator establishes the ensuing debate (lines 368-450) between Venus
and Adonis through a complementary set of images that ostensibly compare
the two while further distancing them. Lines 331-6 imply that Venus burns
to express her desire for Adonis, while in line 338 Adonis is figured
as a burning coal whose anger revives with her return. "He sees her coming
and begins to glow/ Even as a dying coal revives with wind" (338-9). This
imagistic chiasmus concludes with another illusory union between Venus
and Adonis as "Taking no notice that she is so nigh/ For all askance he
holds her in his eye" (339-40).

The erotic distance between the two becomes even more palpable in this
momentary unification in which Adonis "holds her in his eye" while he
tries to hide from her in a solipsistic gesture of concealment. The gaze
according to Renaissance theories based in Plato's Phaedrus saw
staring as the beginning of intimacy; in this case it signifies a reluctant
beginning that moves nowhere. This indication of a potential sexual union
without its realization complements the patterning of imagery surrounding
it which also evokes the sense of sexual union while suspending its actualization.
Thus, action and image, plot and rhetoric, form and content move in analogous
patterns of opposition and ostensible union, teasing but never fulfilling
the text's and the subsequently the reader's desire for closure and completion.

The dialectic play of colour imagery in lines 353-364 shifts into a series
of rhetorical and conversational reversals that begin the intense verbal
combat of lines 368-450. The rhetorical chiasmuses which begin this sequence
give the debate a dynamic, dramatic quality that retains a clear sense
of playfulness, while at the same time developing Venus' increasing frustration:

Venus here develops the earlier image of Adonis' imprinted cheek. This
motif of "engravement" plays proleptically on Adonis' death in which the
boar's tusk will "trench" (1052) itself in his thigh; when Venus laments
that she will not witness "love's deep groans" she unwittingly parallels
the "groans" of love with the "groans" of pain during Adonis' agonized
and violent demise. For further on at line 950 when Venus chides death
she ironically, and tragically asks "What may a heavy groan advantage
thee?" thus returning our focus to the absent and long awaited coitus
scene passed over in favor of the "hard hunt."

Shakespeare ends the third sequence (325-545) with a unique and highly
ironic variation on Adonis' death, which in traditional mythic readings
tends to signify the "dead time of the year, whether winter or the late
summer drought" (Frye Code 69). [6] Shakespeare
sets up a comic play on the mythic death and rebirth element underlying
the narrative by having Venus faint (464) and then quickly revive with
expectations for sexual gratification (482). This variation further develops
the ontological and erotic distance between the two as we see Adonis comically
kissing and poking Venus in an attempt to arouse her from her feigned
sleep. "He bends her fingers, holds her pulses hard/ He chafes her lips;
a thousand ways he seeks/ To mend the hurt that his unkindness marred./
He kisses her; and she, by her good will,/ Will never rise, so he will
kiss her still" (476-80). These unsatisfying kisses finally lead to the
very thing Venus has been waiting for: "Her arms do lend his neck a sweet
embrace; Incorporate then they seem; face grows to face; . . ./ Till breathless
he disjoined, and backward drew/. . . He with her plenty pressed, she
faint with dearth,/ Their lips together glued, fall to the earth" (540-5).
These lines offer the clearest example of the poem's capacity to tease
a reader with a sense of fulfillment while sustaining a dramatic sense
of incompleteness. The ostensibly sensuous term "Incorporate" indicating
the possibility of full physical union is qualified and thus undone by
the disappointing "seem." Following the term "incorporate" Shakespeare
alludes to the imagery of Corinthians I 13:12, expressing a sense of reciprocity
which is consistently undermined: "For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know
even as also I am known". This passage expresses precisely the sense of
intimacy and knowledge of the other the poem seems to move towards without
ever achieving. Finally, after drawing on this powerful Pauline image
of reciprocity the narrator teases us further, relating how, "Their lips
together glued." Even this moment of apparent union is permeated with
comic and ironic overtones as the word "glued" indicates the struggle
Venus had to undergo and which she must sustain in order to simply kiss
the elusive boy-hunter.

The proximity the two achieve in the end of the third section is dramatically
undone in the first three stanzas (547-564) of the fourth sequence. In
the first of these stanzas the narration repeats three of the main rhetorical
images of incommensurability we saw developed in the first sequence between
lines 55-90. The first two lines of the stanza return us to the bird of
prey motif indicating the unequal and predatory nature of the sexual rapport:
"Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey/ And glutton-like she
feeds, yet never filleth" (547-8). The third line repeats the military
or combative image of master and slave implicit throughout much of the
poem: "Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey," (549). And the fourth
line returns us to the rhetoric of monetary exchange: "Paying what ransom
the insultor willeth" (550). The repetition of such images indicates that
Venus and Adonis have returned to their original state of disunion.

The most indicative feature of Shakespeare's concern with expressing
the frustration and antinomies of passion, rather than any sense of symbolic
union achieved through Adonis' death, is the way that Shakespeare reconfigures
the significance of the anemone as it appears in Ovid. In Shakespeare's
version, Adonis' body does not undergo the sort of active and ritualistic
metamorphosis into an enduring reminder that we see in Ovid; instead,
it is transformed by a power that remains unspecified and it is then quickly
"cropped" by Venus in another aggressive act that perpetuates rather than
resolves her desire. In Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses Venus reproaches
the fates and then immediately transforms Adonis' body into an anemone:

She
rent her garments. . .
.
. . and springing down
Reproached
the fates: "Even so, not everything
Shall
own your sway. Memorials of my sorrow
Adonis,
shall endure; each passing year
Your
death repeated in the hearts of men
Shall
re-enact my grief and my lament. . . .
And
with these words she sprinkled nectar
Sweet
scented, on his blood, which at the touch
Swelled
up, as on a pond when showers fall. (Melville trans. 724-37) [7]

Shakespeare's ending is decidedly lacking the theme of recurrence and
resurrection that characterizes Ovid's version, placing in its stead,
a continued sense of dissension:

By
this the boy that by her side lay killed
Was
melted like a vapor from her sight
And
in his blood, that on the ground lay spilled,
A
purple flower sprung up, check'red with white,
Resembling
well his pale cheeks and the blood
Which
in round drops upon their whiteness stood.
Comparing
it to her Adonis' breath,
And
says within her bosom it shall dwell, . . ./
She
crops the stalk, and the breach appears
Green-dropping
sap which she compares to tears. (1165-76)

Some critics, most notably Robert Merrix, have ignored or overlooked the
term "crops", which clearly implies a sense of being "cut short", in order
to read the ending in more Ovidian terms of union and resurrection. Merrix
cites lines 1183-5, "Here was thy father's bed, here in my breast;/ Thou
art next of blood, and 'tis thy right. Lo in this hollow cradle take thy
rest;" in order to show that "[w]ith the transformation of Adonis into
the anemone. . . the two composites are united, forming a sexual resolution,
a synthesis in which the major attributes of each are embodied in the
other" (345). Yet, even here we are invited to read against Venus' choice
of images at the same time we are encouraged to sympathize with her. First
of all, the image of the hollow cradle recalls us to her intense and insatiable
desire that propels the poem's narrative motions; it indicates a sense
of emptiness that has not yet been filled; and second by drawing attention
to her throbbing heart we do not get a sense that she feels any release
or resolution; but rather we sense a feeling of deepening sadness. We
might also recall that at line 945 Venus accuses death of the very thing
she is later guilty of, introducing an unintentional and unfortunate proleptic
warning of the eternal dissension set between her and Adonis: "The Destinies
will curse thee for this stroke/ They bid thee crop a weed; thou pluck'st
a flower" (945-6). In Shakespeare's version Venus becomes the procurer
of her own worst fears.

It is also important to notice that the only line indicating close proximity
between the ill fated two is spoken indirectly by Venus herself, creating
a gap between the actual event as it is narrated and her own interpretation
of it: "Comparing it to her Adonis' breath, and says within her
bosom it shall dwell" (1172). William Keach has noted that the repetition
of the word "compares" and the shock of the word "crops" in this final
sequence makes it clear that the flower functions prosopopeiacally, rather
than indicating the promise of return. Venus, Keach notes, realizes that
"Adonis is not reincarnated in the flower. . . She. . . 'crops' the stalk
and 'compares'. . . the drops of sap to the tears which came to Adonis'
eyes (ll. 1175-1176). Venus' realization that the flower is not Adonis
contributes to the pathos of her comparisons and, in a sense, mitigates
the shock of her 'cropping' the flower" (82-83).

Part of the narrative dynamic of frustration being played out in this
fourth narrative sequence, as well as the poem as a whole, consists of
what Catherine Belsey, following Lacan, terms the trompe l'oeil
motif. Because the poem constructs what Belsey refers to as a "promise
of . . . presence it fails to deliver" (261), it is structurally analogous
to the scopic or visual effect known as trompe l'oeil. Just as
a visual representation might appear to be the thing-as-such, Shakespeare's
poem represents an apparent but finally unrealized union. This withholding
of aesthetic fulfillment suggests that the poem is based on an "erotic
rather than philosophic ontology" (Halpern 383). Both Halpern and Belsey
point to the poem's allusion to Pliny's story of artistic competition
between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, based as it is on the principle of the
trompe l'oeil (ll. 601-6), as a lucid example of this erotically
charged aesthetic:

Even
so poor birds, deceived with painted grapes
Do
surfeit by the eye and pine the maw;
Even
so she languisheth in her mishaps
As
those poor birds that helpless berries saw.
The
warm effects which she in him finds missing
She
seeks to kindle with continual kissing. (601-6)

This passage, which occurs directly after the allusion to Tantalus, offers
a pictorial analogy for the dynamic of frustrated desire the poem dramatizes.
This "pictorial" analogy not only offers a meta-commentary on Venus' unrealized
desire, it also reflects the aesthetic ontology with which the reader
is engaged. For the reader, like Venus, is tantalized by a promise of
narrative and sexual fulfillment that remains unfulfilled. Catherine Belsey
summarizes Lacan's insights into the deceitful pleasures this trompe-l'oeil
dynamic offers a reader or viewer:

In order to enjoy the trompe-l'oeil we have to be convinced
by it in the first instance and then to shift our gaze so that, seeing
the object resolve itself into lines on a canvas, we are no longer
convinced; we have to be deceived and then to acknowledge our own
deception. (262)

For Lacan, the essence of tragic anagnorisis is the recognition of one's
lack-of-being (manque-a-etre). [8] Venus
is driven to such a recognition through her failed attempts to have Adonis
return her desire. She expresses this negative recognition with a combination
of humor and pathos, tragedy and melodrama we have come to expect from
Shakespeare's Queen of love. "O, where am I? . . . in earth or heaven/
Or in the ocean drenched, or in the fire?/ What hour is this? or morn
or weary even?/ Do I delight to die, or life desire?/ . . ./ O, thou didst
kill me, kill me once again!" (492-499). The pun on sexual satisfaction,
mixed as it is with cosmological references, expresses a sense of total
absence, loss, and lack. Venus' agonized recognition of her emptiness
is appropriately expressed as a question, indicating the deep uncertainty
she feels as a result of Adonis' refusals. This passage sets up the even
more dramatic moment when she falls to the ground with Adonis on top of
her only to realize "he will not manage her, although he mount her" (597).

Venus' recognition of her lack stems from her perception of Adonis as
being full and complete unto himself. This same structural relation exists
between the reader of the poem and the text; for just as Venus feels herself
absent before a self-sufficient Adonis, the reader experiences a sense
of lack in relation to a text that appears complete. Richard Halpern articulates
the paradoxical nature of the poem's desire-based ontology by recognizing
that

to reveal [an] image's emptiness is precisely to confirm its power.
. . . Indeed, a kind of metamorphic inversion occurs between viewer
and object, for the unsatisfied hunger of the birds indicates their
own emptiness in relation to the image, which is complete. (383)

This "metamorphic inversion," in which the viewer feels empty in the
presence of an object that appears full and self-sufficient, occurs throughout
the poem in a number of varying forms. The first instance of this occurs
at lines 211-16 when Venus alludes to Pygmalion as she bewails Adonis:
"Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone/ Well-painted idol, image
dull and dead,/ Statue contenting but the eye alone,/ Thing like a man,
but of no woman bred!" (211-14). Here, as in the Pliny allusion, Venus'
psychosexual struggle is expressed through an aesthetic analogy in which
the object viewed inspires a heightened sense of lack in the viewer. Her
object contents "but the eye alone", evoking rather than fulfilling desire.
Where the reader is confronted with the fact that "the signifier precisely
defers, supplants, relegates the imagined presence it sets out to name"
(Belsey Desire 64), Venus is confronted with the fact that her
object is unattainable and unrealizable. Venus' growing frustration over
this intolerable situation expresses itself through her aggressive and
cruel allusion to Adonis' unnatural origins. "Thing like a man, but of
no woman bred!" (214). This erotic/aesthetic ontology in which Adonis
is full and self-sufficient while Venus languishes in her lack is reversed
in lines 235-40 when Venus imagines herself as a park upon which Adonis
feeds himself. The fulfillment that Venus seeks thus demands a reversal
of the unreciprocal mode of perceiving presented in lines 211-16: in order
to achieve a sense of momentary fulfillment she imagines being self-sufficient,
full, and generative. The same dynamic occurs even more explicitly at
line 370, "Would thou wert as I am, and I a man/ My heart all whole as
thine, thy heart my wound!" Venus' only power against Adonis' refusals
lies in such rhetorical gestures; for as Richard Halpern observes, Venus
"must content herself with 'venerian speculation'" (Halpern 380). Halpern,
moreover, sees an analogy between Venus' plight and the reader's relation
to the text insofar as "[t]he theological gap that separates Venus from
the merely mortal Adonis stands in for the ontological gap between the.
. . reader and the empty imaginations generated by the poem" (380). Thus
part of the process of reading the poem consists of imaginatively re-enacting
or reproducing its dramatization of unfulfilled desire.

A further example of the trompe l'oeil dynamic occurs during the
ekphrasis, when Adonis' horse is described in complete detail, playing
on this ontological relationship between viewer and object:

Look
when a painter would surpass the life
In
limning out a well proportioned steed
His
art with nature's workmanship at strife As
if the dead the living should exceed
So
did this horse excel a common one
In
shape, in courage, color, pace and bone . . .

Look
what a horse should have he did not lack
Save
a proud rider on so proud a back.
(my
emphasis 290-300)

The density of this passage lies in its long, careful description of the
horse which functions like the close and mimetically accurate brush-strokes
of a Renaissance painter filling in every conceivable detail in order
to convey a sense of totality and completeness within the image:

Although some readers may find this passage somewhat tedious, its unusually
dense and exaggerated description paradoxically reminds us as viewers
that it is description and not real. Shakespeare's description presents
a kind of wholeness while at the same time making it clear to a reader
that the fullness is an effect and not the thing itself. Passages such
as this offer a complex and subtle meta-commentary on the relationship
between the reader and the text; for just as the description of the horse
is a "full-representation" and not the thing itself, the text is an "unresponsive
artwork" intended to "generate some kind of sexual thrill or tension"
without being able to actually fulfill the desire it is capable of evoking
(Halpern 380). Thus Shakespeare's poem presents an unusual self-awareness
of the relationship between the text and the reader, revealing the ways
in which the text is the site upon which the reader's own desires are
manipulated, frustrated, and enjoyed. As much of the critical history
of the poem reveals, it is extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even impossible,
to interpret the poem without repeating some of the dramatic motions it
represents. [9] To see the text as an allegory
against lust is to repeat Adonis' position in the poem; to unabashedly
enjoy its erotic and verbal play is to align oneself with Venus; to become
frustrated with Adonis' refusals is to take up Titan's place in the poem.
Thus the structure of the poem -- with its repetition of ostensible moments
of resolution, enticing and humorous rhetorical displays and its highly
erotic aesthetic ontology -- opens up an interpretive space that allows
a reader to identify his or her own desires within its frame.

Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to Mary Silcox for her insightful
comments on various versions of this paper.

2. It is generally understood that Marlowe's poem
was written before Shakespeare's and that Shakespeare had some knowledge
of it before publication. William Keach notes that "although Marlowe's
epyllion was not entered in the Stationers' Register until 28 September
1593, almost five and a half months after Shakespeare's (18 April), and
of course not published until 1598, it must have been written by the spring
of 1593, since Marlowe was killed at Deptford on 30 May of that year"
(85).

3. See Peter Brooks' "Freud's Masterplot:
Questions of Narrative." Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question
of Reading Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982), 94-207, for
a discussion of the role of metonymy and desire in narrative.

4. Goddess of the moon, the hunt, and chastity.

5. The demonic erotic relation, according to Frye,
"becomes a fierce destructive passion that works against loyalty or
frustrates the one who possesses it" (Anatomy 149).

6. See Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the
Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (Northridge: California State UP, 1976),
for a mythic reading of the poem by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

7. Golding's translation follows Ovid in making
Venus explicitly responsible for the metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower
(848-54).

8. For a discussion of Lacan's views on tragedy,
particularly in relation to Hegel's reading of Antigone and Freud's
views on catharsis, see The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar VII
(243-311).

9. For readings that clearly identify with Adonis
over against Venus see David N. Beauregard, "Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's
Representation of the Passions," Shakespeare Studies 8 (1976),
1-23, and C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding
Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954). See also Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Much
Ado with Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare's Venus and
Adonis," Review of English Studies 44 (1993), 479-501, for
a discussion of William Reynolds' idiosyncratic response to the poem. For
a reading that valorizes Venus see Nona Fienberg, "Thematics of Value
in Venus and Adonis," in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays,
ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 247-58. For a discussion
of the poem that seeks to symbolically unify Venus and Adonis see Robert
P. Merrix, "'Lo, in This Hollow Cradle Take Thy Rest': Sexual Conflict
and Resolution in Venus and Adonis," in Venus and Adonis:
Critical Essays, 341-358.